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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27615521">The Man on the Bed</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/awheyaway/pseuds/awheyaway'>awheyaway</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Blood, Body Horror, Claustrophobia, Fire, Gore, M/M, Parasites, Scopophobia, Self-Harm, not in the usual sense for that last one though</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-11-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-11-18</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-07 03:07:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,870</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27615521</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/awheyaway/pseuds/awheyaway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>"I lie awake and watch it all, it feels like thousand eyes."</p><p>In which Jon, between the events of Seasons Four and Five, sees far more than he ever could have wanted. A post-apocalyptic take on Elias's statement from MAG 120.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>29</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Man on the Bed</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To say that the man lying on the bed is asleep would be false. He lies unmoving and unresponding, but he does not rest. His eyes are not closed. His eyes are never closed. There is another man on the bed, curled up and shaking beside the first. He is asleep, though he does not truly rest either.</p><p>The first man is stretched out on his back, body rigid. His hands are bunched tightly at his sides, with the skin covering his knuckles fading to a painful white. Looking at his eyes, the first word that would come to mind would be ‘unseeing’- but that too is by no means correct. He certainly isn’t looking at anything above him, for his gaze both stops too short and extends far too long to be directed at the peeling off-white paint of the bedroom ceiling.</p><p>The man’s irises, focused on a point far beyond the confines of the room, flick wildly from side to side. It is not the natural twitching of REM sleep but a sort of panicked rush, the eyes of somebody trying to see as much as they can in a short, stress-filled period. They are the eyes of a desperately unprepared student, twelve minutes prior to the exam that could ruin her life, trying to look at every page in her binder of notes simultaneously. They are the eyes of a man surrounded from all sides by a pride of starving lions, trying to keep tabs on whichever one has approached the closest at any given moment.</p><p>Lying frozen on the top of the sheets, the man sees a great many things. Unlike the student or the prey, his eyes have the capability to hold every single one in his mind at once, and the weight of it all is almost enough to break him.</p><p>He sees a factory filled with systems and mechanisms, chopping and slicing and crushing and discarding the skin and bones of the helpless bodies who pass through. As the production line advances and body after body is carelessly torn limb from limb by the unfeeling machinery, he realizes that he cannot tell a single despairing face apart from the ones surrounding it. It matters little, though- there are so very many of them and any given face will be shredded to gristle within seconds by the grinding of the equipment further down the conveyor line.</p><p>He sees hundreds of people walking inexorably along sickly white paths, keeling over and spasming at regular intervals with looks that can only be described as horrified vindication. They knew they would die, had always been fully aware and fully afraid, and nobody had believed them. Yet here they are, passing away suddenly and helplessly, and their feelings of satisfaction at having been correct all these years cannot hold a candle to the deep and hollow fear that after all of their years of “miraculously cheating death”, their time is finally up and there isn’t a single thing they can do about it. After a time, he sees them brought back from the very brink of the void, only to continue moving along their routes towards their final and inevitable destination. The watcher sees a man who he knows guiding the doomed through the process with an expression resembling both comfort and resignation, and he nods to this spectator amiably as he passes. The man watching can see that his chest has split open, with a dense clump of thick and dull orange-black tendrils reaching out to tether him to each and every unwilling participant.</p><p>He sees Charles Lawrence Davidson, as does everybody around him. Charles is running, desperately, through a street filled with faces he knows. Every single one of their bodies is frozen and unmoving, save for their heads, which turn at unnatural angles to follow him as he passes, their eyes fixed on his terrified frame. Reflected in their glassy pupils is the precise knowledge of everything Charles has ever done, everything Charles has ever said, everything Charles has ever <em>thought</em>. Charles is fully aware of the level at which he is exposed, and even more so he is aware of the fact that every single one of them hates him for who he really is. Not a single person responds to his despairing pleas as he stumbles through the alleys and buildings. Charles can’t blame them for that.</p><p>He sees a family, barricaded in a storm cellar that does little to impede the tide of the radiation pouring in from the wasteland above. Outside, there are things that defy description moving around and nesting in the ruins of their home. They do not care about the five of them in the slightest, save as perhaps a potential food source should they be foolish enough to let down their defenses or venture outside. The family is changing, their bodies swelling and bloating from exposure to the nuclear energy seeping through the roof over their heads, their minds poisoned by both radiation and the far more insidious force of suspicion. Each believe themselves to be unchanged, surrounded by whatever leering menace lurks behind the miserable faces of their loved ones, but in reality every one is as far gone as the next, a distant cry from whatever semblance of humanity they used to possess.</p><p>He sees a woman curled on the ground, scrabbling and tearing at the irritated skin of her own stomach. Her fingernails gouge deeply into the reddened flesh, sending fresh trickles of blood pouring over the dried trails already hardening on her abdomen and chest. There is something making its nest at her very core, some parasite, some horrific intruder. She is painfully, nauseatingly aware of that presence and she feels the need to strip it out more intensely than the need to breathe. But no matter how deeply she digs, she cannot find the chittering, scuttling <em>thing</em> that she knows is infecting her, infesting her, and as the panic sets in she can do nothing but continue to tear her skin and sinew asunder. The man, however, can see exactly where the insect nestles, deep within the hollow spaces of her organs and bones, birthing the first larvae of what is sure to be a thriving and vibrant hive soon enough.</p><p>He sees a mass grave, an enormous pit in soft earth filled to the brim with rotting corpses. Gravediggers with heavy boots and bandannas tied around their faces pour shovels of crumbling earth into the spaces between the countless bodies, while others stomp around atop the heap on order to compress their stiffening flesh and make room for more to be piled on. The man cannot smell the pungent odor rising from the pit as its contents bake in the heat, and he is glad of it. Deep within the corpses, several dozen layers deep, lies a man who has not quite managed to die. He had been comatose when they dragged him down here, but he had still been breathing. He is certain that if they’d checked, they would have noticed. Why hadn’t they checked? The man watching silently knows that they had, in fact, checked, and had found exactly what they were looking for. Impossibly crushed under the weight of a hundred fetid bodies, the buried man begins to scream the phrase, again and again, sobbing. Why hadn’t they checked? <em>Why hadn’t they checked?</em> With every heaving breath, more and more air escapes from his hyperventilating lungs. At work high above, the gravediggers hear him, share a smile amongst themselves, and continue to pile the bodies and soil ever higher.</p><p>He sees a woman, wreathed in flame, a delighted smile splitting through the dribbling currents of her melting face. In the apartments around her, there are people screaming. The man watches them hurl themselves against locked doors and closed windows, flame lapping at their heels as they tear at the locks with their fingernails and teeth. One person reaches out to the grinning woman as their flesh begins to blacken and peel, and she reaches down and takes them in her arms. Their cries intensify in volume and pitch as parts of their body slough away beneath her molten touch. She drops what's left of them, and as their remains begin to knit themselves back together to suffer anew, she turns to her silent observer and cocks her head to one side in a curious gesture.</p><p>He stands at the base of a tower, staring up at it and staring out from it. Impossibly tall, it seems to curve up and in on itself to loom over the world. From the man’s perspective at the sprouting base of it, the peak of the tower would be almost too high for a normal person to even see- but of course, he is so much more than that now. Higher up the distorted face of the tower, it begins to lose its solidity and form, opening and expanding and pulling itself agape into a shape not unlike the curve of a bell. At that point, the worked wood and stone of the structure gives way to a thick and dark vitreous-like substance, writhing and slick. The very apex of the tower funnels upwards to join with the sky overhead, pooling outwards in the shape of a perfect circle that extends over the man’s head and casts a shadow for miles around. Surrounding it on all sides, following the sloping curvature of the sky, is an expanse of pure and deep green, slightly textured with thin lines of musculature and large flecks of black and gold. Far beyond that, acting as a border to this vast green pool at the barest edge of the horizon, a strip of bloodshot white stretches away past the ends of the visible sky. The man knows this sky as the sky knows him, for the infinite eye that gazes down upon the world is one and the same with the pair sunken into the man’s own sockets.</p><p>All this and infinitely more passes in the span of a single heartbeat, as the man on the bed gazes out upon the world that he has damned. As the tears roll down his slack face, he is unable to blink them away. Beside him, the other man lets out a low and dull moan, still asleep, and begins to thrash slightly, eyes flitting as his mind is consumed with nightmarish visions. His pillow, too, is stained with tears, and his throat is raw from unconscious cries.</p><p>Above them, the wooden structure of their room warps slightly inwards, and the ensuing shudder running through the walls around them carries with it a strong impression of satisfaction and perverse delight. On the bed, the first man’s glazed eyes continue to stare beyond and outward as he rolls to one side and curls around his sleeping companion. Neither body is warm, and the man knows that the other cannot even feel his attempt at a reassuring embrace with his mind’s current state, but he finds that it provides some slight semblance of comfort to himself. Lying together in the cabin’s embrace, the pair’s respective nightmares, both real and conjured, continue unabated.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Interestingly enough, despite being a major fan of OMAM's music, writing the fic description as I was about to post it was the first time the correlation with the lyrics of Thousand Eyes ever even crossed my mind. </p><p>This is my first, uh, normal fic, so please let me know what you think of it!</p><p>(also shoutout to @Mad_Maudlin for giving me some really helpful information about how eyes work, which I then promptly ignored in favor of the slightly incorrect but significantly cooler-sounding portion I already had written, still much appreciated though)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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